Last week, in a fit of confusion and something that tasted a little bit like desperation salted with hope, I wrote what follows. I didn’t publish it, of course, because even though I tend to be pretty confessional in this space, I am, at the end of the day, loathe to post anything that makes me look insane, or idiotic, or both:

I am convinced that I am pregnant. The thing is, I can’t possibly be pregnant. You see how this could be confusing.

I can’t be pregnant because my husband had a vasectomy. Sure, there have been cases where vasectomies have failed, but those are extremely rare. So rare, that when you google ‘vasectomy failure rates’ you come across eleventeen thousand variations on jokes with the punchline vasectomy failure — or did the postman ring twice, *nudge-nudge-wink-wink*?? Also, I’m old, at least within the context of fertility. Late maternal age and all that. Which is one of the reasons why we had the vasectomy, which involves snippage of the internal man parts, which is why it’s a pretty good bet, contraception-wise. So I can’t be pregnant.